Rob Lowe’s Tips for Re-Re-Reinventing Yourself

He was in the Brat Pack...and the first celebrity sex tape any of us can remember. He was electric in St. Elmo's Fire...then needed a cameo in Wayne’s World to goose his flagging career. He was the biggest name on The West Wing...and eventually got himself written right off the show. Now, fresh off five beautiful seasons of Parks and Rec,Rob Lowe is back—again!—with a meta sitcom, The Grinder. Will it succeed? Does that even matter?

Rob Lowe makes an entrance like a former heartthrob should: Tan and taut from a recent vacation in Greece (and daily workouts), he wheels into the parking lot and cuts the engine on his customized black Triumph Bonneville. He is wearing jeans and a navy V-neck James Perse T-shirt that hugs his lack of paunch, just as it was meant to. Aviator sunglasses flash under his royal-blue helmet, a vintage gold Rolex Daytona with a black face glints on his wrist, and maybe it’s my imagination, but doesn’t the blue of his Hogan sneakers match the color of his eyes?

Don’t judge me. If you were here on the patio of one of Lowe’s favorite Santa Barbara restaurants, watching the man who once gave new meaning to the term “pretty boy” saunter toward your table, you’d gush, too. No matter your preferences, your gender, your age, your “type,” there is no denying that the 51-year-old Lowe looks better than ever. And here’s the best part: Over the next four hours, while you stare at him, you will also get to listen to him. And what comes out of his mouth will be, well, pretty smart for a pretty boy.

“If you would have asked me when I was 18 and one of the hot Young Turks on the scene what I wanted from my life, I would have completely sold myself short,” he says. “I would have wanted the lead in the next Martin Scorsese movie. Well, I didn’t get it. I still haven’t gotten it. But I wouldn’t trade it for what I have.”

As he prepares to start shooting his next TV series, Fox’s The Grinder, Lowe has agreed to discuss something he is expert in: reinvention. Twenty-six years sober, he has had a career marked by standout performances, but he has also weathered his share of flops, disses, and at least one scandal. He turned 18 on the set of his first film, The Outsiders, which was directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Not a bad beginning. And yet, from the start, he says, life seemed determined to teach him some hard lessons—many that served him later, to be sure, but man, they were a bitch to learn.

So how, we ask, did he not just survive but prosper? How did he know what to change and what to protect? Lowe smiles, tugs on the sobriety pendant that hangs on a vintage gold chain around his neck, and shares a little wisdom:

Before you can reinvent (or re-reinvent) yourself, you have to get noticed in the first place.
“I look at acting as sort of a collaborative blood sport. I take pride in being generous and wanting everybody to look good. But my first movie, The Outsiders, starred eighteen type A, testosterone-riddled, ambitious actors [Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, Ralph Macchio...]. In that situation, you’d better fucking figure out a way to hold your ground. I think that never really left me.”

Embrace (or at least learn to live with) disappointment. _
“_I remember the screening where I saw The Outsiders for the first time. Emilio might have been with me, and definitely Steve Burum, the cinematographer. I’ll never forget Steve saying, in his dry way, ‘This movie is going to make $100 million.’ And the credits came up and the movie started, and it just deteriorated from there. [No one had told him that the majority of his scenes had been edited out.] I went from a guy telling me the movie was going to make $100 million to realizing I’m not in the fucking movie. I honestly don’t think I’ve still recovered from it. I was young enough not to know any better. I thought it was personal, or maybe I must have been bad. Many years later, when I was 40, they rereleased it and showed me the original [uncut] version. And I just remember being so relieved that it was good. If that version of the movie had come out—the version that I thought we were doing, the version that was in the script—I would have had a different, more substantive career, and I would have had it quicker. Without a doubt.”

Understand the time you’re in, even if your timing is not great.
“Back in the early ’80s, there was a movie everybody wanted to be in called Birdy. It ended up being cast with Matthew Modine and Nic Cage. That movie today stars Chris Hemsworth. The studios today want the modern version of Tab Hunter. Everything is about youth. It would have been interesting to have come up now, when traditional leading men are really valued. In the time that I came up, the anti–leading man was valued. Sean Penn. Mickey Rourke. When Mickey walked [onto the set] of The Outsiders, it was like you would have thought Brando showed up. They were kowtowing to him. He was on roller skates and hadn’t bathed. It was not probably the best time ever for somebody like me.”

Underreact.
“In 1985, right before St. Elmo’s Fire opened, New York magazine labeled Emilio, Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, Judd Nelson, and me ‘Hollywood’s Brat Pack.’ It was hard. We were totally minimized—like we were indistinguishable pretty people. But the irony was, it ended up being a piece that was too hip for the room. The snark was completely lost on the rest of the country. Everybody just thought it was fucking great. You know, I’ve had Peyton and Eli Manning come up to me and play scenes from St. Elmo’s Fire. I’ve had Gwyneth Paltrow play scenes from St. Elmo’s Fire. So after years of that, I’m down with the Brat Pack.”

Lowe knows you’re looking at him. He doesn’t say so, but he can’t help but know it. People have been looking at him—marveling, really—his whole life. In his two best-selling memoirs, both written entirely (and winningly) by Lowe himself, “being objectified is a big theme,” he says.

When he was younger, before he stopped drinking, he says he reaped the benefits of his beauty without giving the downside much thought. He tells a great story in Stories I Only Tell My Friends, his first book, about Princess Stephanie of Monaco, with whom he had a brief affair at the age of 22. Midway through their fling, he discovered a magazine in her closet with him on the cover. She told him she had kept it on her nightstand for months, only removing it after she met him in person. Is that the kind of objectification he’s talking about, I ask? He laughs.

“In those days, the pre-sobriety days, it was, like, all good. You know: However I can get there”—by which he seems to mean “get laid by a beautiful woman”—“I was perfectly happy,” he tells me. “It was more in the ensuing years that you kind of look at the price of it.”

In 1988 he paid a very public price, when a videotape surfaced of Lowe having sex with two young women in an Atlanta hotel. One was 22, the other 16, but because the incident occurred in Georgia, where the age of consent is 16, Lowe did not face criminal charges. Still, his image took a hit.

Over the years, Lowe has consistently said that the leaking of the sex tape was a gift, if only because it hastened his trip to the bottom (a prerequisite to getting help). Indirectly, it also gave him his first shot at a genre—comedy—that would prove very fruitful. On March 17, 1990—his 26th birthday—he hosted Saturday Night Live, mocking himself openly (he was admonished for his promiscuous behavior by Dana Carvey’s “Church Lady”). After years of being pretty, Lowe was suddenly revealed to also be funny. A door had opened, but Lowe wasn’t yet fully equipped to stride through it. Just weeks after the SNL hosting gig, he checked himself into a treatment facility in Arizona.

When he came out of rehab a month later, he walked into the arms of Sheryl Berkoff—a makeup artist he’d met on a blind date seven years before. He credits her with inspiring him to change his life. They married in 1991 and, but for a single sip of a mimosa mistakenly poured for him by a flight attendant, he has not had an alcoholic drink since.

Pick the right partner.
“Ninety percent of moviemaking is casting. Same with life. When I met my wife, Sheryl, I knew I’d seen the perfect woman for the job.”

Don’t stop.Ever**.**
“I’ve been fortunate that I’ve always, always, always worked. Even after the sex tape was made public, it was like: You’re still a professional baseball player, but you’re playing for Double or Triple A. I lost the role in Titanic that Billy Zane got. But I was never banned from the game.”

Flip the script—then flip it again.
“If you are in a transitional period, a rebuilding period, a fallow period, go to the opposite end of your range. For me, that was comedy. Lorne Michaels and Mike Myers put me in Wayne’s World and Austin Powers. What keeps people from doing that? You get fearful. If a certain play is working, if you’ve been passing for 200 yards, you don’t all of a sudden start running the ball. But there was a moment when I was playing Eddie Nero on Californication, the senator on Brothers & Sisters, Chris Traeger on Parks and Recreation, and Drew Peterson [in a TV movie about the killer]—sometimes all in the same week. I thought: This isn’t what I signed up for, but it’s actually better than what I signed up for.”

Remember who called when no one else did.
“Only two people called [after the sex tape]. Jodie Foster and Don Simpson [the producer]. Jodie and I had done The Hotel New Hampshire together, and she sent me a note with a recurring line from John Irving: ‘Keep passing the open windows.’ She was saying, ‘You’ll get through it.’ Don basically said, ‘Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.’ Oh, and Hugh Hefner took me aside at one point and said, ‘You had to do it. The technology existed.’ ”

Do other things in bed, too.
“If sleeping were an Olympic sport, I would be Michael Phelps. Really. You have no idea. It’s kind of embarrassing.”

Find a high that’s harmless.
“Jetlag is the closest I get to getting high these days. I get a little lightheaded and really energetic. Crazy energy. It’s cool. It reminds me of 1985.”

We’ve been talking for a while across a small table, but suddenly he’s up, scooting his chair closer. “Let me move over here where I can hear you better,” he says, and I remember that as a child, after a bout of mumps, he lost all hearing in his right ear. “I am so deaf,” he says, observing rather than complaining. “I’m getting only deafer as I’m getting older.”

He doesn’t look anything like an old man. His brown hair has gone a bit salt-and-pepper, but it suits him. “Look, a lot of it is genetics,” he acknowledges. But there’s also this: “Since the time I was 15, I’ve had the best in the world taking care of my skin.” He’s talking about moisturizers. Hydration. He wouldn’t have done it on his own, he admits—though now he is here to say you should (yes, his new skin-care line, Profile4Men, launched in May). Bottom line, he knows how lucky he was. “I’m telling you, you use all the special technologies and the latest and greatest since the time you were 15, and you’re going to see results.”

Lowe grew up smack in the middle of the country in Dayton, Ohio. His parents—Charles, a lawyer, and Barbara Lynn, a teacher—divorced when he was 4. Then, when he was 12, his mom moved him and his younger brother, Chad, to Malibu. He’d already decided he wanted to be an actor after seeing Oliver! at 8 years old. Now he was just a few miles from Hollywood, living in what would turn out to be a hothouse for young male studliness.

If life gives you Malibu, make Malibu-ade.
“When I was growing up in Malibu, I used to trick or treat at Martin Sheen’s house, just hoping he would answer the door. By the end of high school, I became friends with Charlie Sheen and Emilio. We’d float around their pool, and Chris Penn—Sean’s brother, who is no longer with us; what a sweet boy—was the filmmaking auteur of the neighborhood. In Malibu in the ’70s, it was always time to make a Super 8 film about ’Nam. Everything was about ’Nam. Oh, and Charlie made a great movie starring his buddy Johnny Depp where the whole premise was blowing up the Fotomat. Remember Fotomats? Anyway, what Laurel Canyon was to music in ’68 and ’70, Malibu was to young actors. The acting coach Peggy Feury lived there. And Joan Didion. My brother went to school with her daughter, Quintana. Like, at the Christmas pageant, you’d be sitting next to Joan Didion. The place was fucking unreal.”

When in doubt, watch Network.
“It’s always time for pie. And it’s always time to watch Network. Bill Holden’s performance is simple. Natural. Charismatic. He’s not young, but he’s handsome. He’s a man with a capital M. That one line: ‘I’m closer to the end than the beginning.’ It would be awfully tough to top Bill Holden. Aaron Sorkin and I talk about that a lot. I think that’s probably his favorite screenplay ever.”

Lowe’s complex relationship with Sorkin has been the subject of much speculation. The actor has said that his four-plus years on The West Wing reignited his passion for acting. Then Lowe left the show. And even though he devoted an entire chapter to that period in his second book, Love Life, it’s never been entirely clear what led to his departure. Many have presumed that he and Sorkin, who ran a notoriously exhausting set, had a falling out. And yet, two years after Lowe left, he starred as Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee in a London West End production of Sorkin’s play A Few Good Men.

“It’s a great part,” Lowe explains, adding that doing theater “was heaven. If I could support myself, I would probably only do that.” (He couldn’t, apparently: “In terms of how much it cost me to do it, I should have burned money during my curtain call.”) But really, A Few Good Men was about reinventing his relationship with Sorkin, he says. “More than anything, I did it because I wanted another chapter with him.”

Then he says more about what happened between them than he ever has:

Know when to quit (because you’re not wanted).
“When I left The West Wing [after contract talks broke down in the fourth season], I remember Martin Sheen taking me aside and saying, ‘Boy, I sure hope you know where you’re headed with this. I mean, man, you’d better have Steven Spielberg offering to put you in a movie.’ I was like, ‘Well, no, I don’t.’ But look, I love a negotiation where they make it really easy for you. I love it when it’s like a ‘take it or leave it’ that’s insulting. In the end, I could have lived with the fact that everyone on the show had gotten a raise but me—if I felt that we really knew what the story lines were going to be. One writer on the show told me he was in a meeting in which they told him to write whatever he wanted. He goes, ‘I want to write a story about Sam Seaborn going back to Ohio to deal with his father who has Alzheimer’s.’ The response: ‘You can write for anybody but him.’ I’m not even sure that it was Aaron Sorkin who said it. Aaron may know nothing about it.”

Don’t complain.
“It’s all good in the hood. I mean, I’m so blessed to have been part of something great. The last thing anybody wants to hear is that John Lennon hated Paul McCartney. They just want to hear ‘Hey Jude.’ And by the way, nobody cares. Unless it’s about Fleetwood Mac, and then we can’t get enough of it. Listen, I never had any issues with Aaron. To his credit, Aaron writes what he wants to write, and he’s not telling anybody, ‘I’m going to guarantee you two great [story lines].’ And I loved The West Wing. But man, it was grueling. We shot near the Friends stage, and we would roll in at, like, 6 in the morning, and the ‘friends’ would come in, in their Ferraris and Lamborghinis, like, at 11:30 a.m., and by midnight they would have shot their show. They’d be gone and we’d be there until 6 in the morning. The sun would rise. That would never happen in TV today. Never. They’d never pay for the overtime. It was a moment in time, both in terms of the economics of the business and how successful the show was. Aaron had the kind of latitude to do it. It will never be done again.”

Know when to quit (because you don’t want to stay).
“I left Brothers & Sisters when they ran out of storytelling runway. I mean, there are so many family dinners you can do. I eventually had to go to them and say, ‘Look, I don’t do spatula work. I don’t do scenes with oven mitts. If you’re looking for that, you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not doing scenes about casseroles. It’s not happening.’ ”

Fuck resentment.
“For someone in recovery like me, the single greatest hurdle—the number one with a bullet that will make you drink—is resentment. You can’t have it. People always say, ‘How have you been sober 26 years? What’s the secret?’ Well, that’s it. I always feel there’s enough room at the table. If somebody else is achieving more than I am, that means I can do it, too. Everybody has the ability to raise themselves up, and my life has been marked by that.”

Always an option: a new tattoo.
“Here on my shoulder is my ‘I’m still crazy’ tattoo. My ‘I may be sober, but I’m still a fucking badass’ tattoo. It’s all faded and fucked up, but it used to be a koi fish.”

The lunch dishes have been cleared, the espresso consumed (he downed two doubles). We’ve been talking about how important it is to take chances, and about how hard it can be to know which chances are worth taking. His cameo in HBO’s 2013 Liberace biopic, Behind the Candelabra, was a no-brainer, he says. He said yes based solely on the director’s reputation, without even reading the script. “My agents e-mailed me and said, ‘Steven Soderbergh wants you to play this part in this movie.’ I was like, ‘Send me the script, but I can tell you right now I’m doing it.’ Actually, I think what I said was, ‘Unless I’m blowing a donkey in the script, I’m doing it.’ Little did I know that it wouldn’t have been outside the realm of possibility.”

Lowe was almost unrecognizable in the role of plastic surgeon Jack Startz, his face distorted and stretched so torturously that he couldn’t blink his eyes. It was a look he insisted upon, he tells me, as a way of protecting his interests. “I was thinking in my most sort of gimlet-eyed, hired-hand, gunslinger mindset: I don’t want to get blown out of the water by Michael Douglas, who’s going to be playing fucking Liberace, and Matt Damon, who’s going to be wearing butt-tight velour,” he says. “So with that in mind, I came up with this guy, tightly pulled and shiny. I’m a huge Laker fan, and I’ve had courtside seats for many years, and I’d always notice these L.A. guys who were not on the floor and not at the top. They were these mid-level-seat guys who had some money, but not a lot of money. They had hot girlfriends, but not that hot. I know that guy.”

This year he took a very different risk, appearing in a series of ads for DirecTV that played around with how people think about Rob Lowe. Lowe got to play a series of characters with names like Scrawny Arms Rob Lowe, Painfully Awkward Rob Lowe, Far Less Attractive Rob Lowe. Then a preternaturally handsome Lowe would come in and tell the viewer, “Don’t be like this me. Get rid of cable and upgrade to DirecTV.” Aside from the paycheck, what intrigued Lowe was the chance to play around with his image, all while doing the kind of sketch comedy that he’d only gotten to do once before, on SNL.

“They came to me, and when I saw that line in the Scrawny Arms Rob Lowe skit—‘I guess I won’t be having any mayonnaise’ [because he is a weakling who can’t open the jar]—I was like, ‘Oh, I am so fucking into this.’ ” But he admits he had to silence his inner critic before he could actually say yes. Which leads us to perhaps the most important of his final reinventing directives:

Don’t overthink.
“When DirecTV came to me, it was like, ‘Well, but they want to do six of them. What does that say? Six of them! Does that make it look like that’s all I’m doing, or should I do one? One is more elite.’ All that shit—I mean, I could write a monologue of a thousand reasons to not do it. But stop thinking, Can I do a great job? Is it interesting? Are the auspices good? If you get two of the three, you’re in.”

Whenever possible, own it.
“I’ve been lucky: I’ve usually been in stuff that I like, and that’s great. But it’s not always a proprietary situation. When you’re one of the partners [like he is on The Grinder, which debuts in September], that makes it so much sweeter. It makes it so much easier to take the beating.”

But don’t be (completely) defined by your job.
“Anytime that you’re looking to be valued exclusively and solely by your vocation, you’re asking for trouble. Find a hobby—or anything that takes you outside of yourself. It can be as simple as raising your kids, or golfing, or surfing.”

Fight for what’s yours.
“One time I took off on a wave next to a guy, and he grabbed my leash and yanked it. I went flying. So I paddled back and fucking hit him. I may wear makeup for a living, but I will fight you in the water.”